And so, I mean, he declared war right there and then in so many words and Alex says later in the book, nobody in the White House from that point on had any doubt that we were going to bomb the mainland of Asia.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Had we not pursued the hydrogen bomb, there is a very real threat that we would now all be speaking Russian. I have no regrets.
If the prime minister really believes it, he must be the only person left who thinks that the recent bombs in London had no connection at all with his policy in Iraq.
Look at what President Kennedy managed to achieve during the Cuban missile crisis. If Bush had been president in 1962, do you think he would have avoided a nuclear war?
I always go back to Harry Truman: Should we drop an atomic bomb to save 100,000 lives? That's a hell of a decision to make. Did he make that decision by himself? No, he had advisers.
The real question was, here we had this information, Bin Laden intends to strike in the United States. We knew they had struck before in 1993 at the World Trade Center in the first bombing of the trade center.
My experience is that if the military didn't want to use force and was confronted with a president that did, the military would come back with what I would call the 'bomb Moscow' scenario. They would say it had to be done with conditions that were so extreme, you obviously wouldn't do it.
I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth.
Nixon did have a secret plan, and I knew that it involved making threats of nuclear war to North Vietnam.
And he said that he didn't want to have a war or anything like that again.
According to Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief, Bush was so obsessed with Iraq that he failed to take action against Osama Bin Laden despite repeated warnings from his intelligence experts.